15-Year-Old Prostitute Arrested Along With Pimp, 58 Others

Sixty souls were apprehended in Polk County over the last week, as Polk's finest spent your tax payer dollars arresting sex-workers and their clients. Among the apprehended were a sex-starved Disney mechanic and a man with breast implants who advertised his services on Backpage.com. (Backpage.com is a classifieds website owned by this publication's parent company, Village Voice Media.) Surely, the world is a better place now.

There was something chilling about the language with which the Orlando Sentinel's Bianca Prieto documented the sting in yesterday's papers. After reviewing the basic facts and going into some detail about the apprehended shemale, Prieto wrote:

Others arrested included a 15-year-old runaway from Chicago who arrived at the undercover location with her pimp and 2-month-old child. The alleged pimp, Jonathan Padilla, remained in the car while the girl went in to meet the undercover officers.

Padilla and the juvenile were arrested, and the infant was turned over to the Department of Children and Families.

Pardon me, but if a 15-year-old Polk County girl had sex with a janitor at her high school she would be hugged and put in analysis. Here, however, is a runaway who has been bought, sold, and almost certainly raped, and now she's been arrested. Sweet justice!

Perhaps the girl's arrest was a mere formality -- perhaps the charges will be thrown out, and she'll be given a hug, an ear, semi-permanent shelter and some good, stern counseling. But probably not. She was charged with solicitation and child abuse; a one-two-punch that ought to see her living out the remainder of her adolescence in a Crime College juvenile detention facility. Justice is blind, apparently, as well as blunt, mean, and more than a little stupid.